Essential Summer Reading, National Security

Over a year ago

by Robert de Neufville

I am taking a couple of weeks off. But while I’m away, I thought I’d
share with you some of the what I consider to be this year’s essential
readings on politics. Today, I want to look at the national security and
civil liberties.

The best place to start is probably “Collateral Murder,” the
controversial video showing the killing of a dozen people—including two
people who worked for Reuters—by the U.S. military in a suburb of
Baghdad. After Reuters tried without success to get the military to
release the classified video under the Freedom of Information Act, an
army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning—who has since been
charged with disclosing secrets and put in prison—leaked the video to
Wikileaks, which published it with commentary. While there is some
debate about whether the killings were in fact murders, the disturbing
video is worth looking at, if only to better understand what’s going on
in Iraq.

According to the NCIS documents, each
prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it
to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner
was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his
own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are
then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on
those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the
noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he
asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who
were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions
almost simultaneously.

Finally, take a look at “He
Was Tortured, But He Can’t Sue” (NYR Blog, June 15). In it, David
Cole talks about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to refuse to hear
the case of his client, Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was detained in
2002 and sent to Syria, where he was held without charges and tortured
for more than a year. Canada’s parliament issued an unanimous apology to
Arar and awarded him $10 million (Canadian) for mistakenly listing him
as the target of a terrorism investigation after a conclusive 1100-page
blue-ribbon commission report cleared him of any wrongdoing. But U.S.
courts have refused to consider Arar’s case, on the grounds that the
rendition program is too sensitive to be discussed in court—even if it's
illegal.

In President Obama’s May 2009 speech on
national security and American values, he opposed a commission to
investigate torture by arguing that there were proceedings in the courts
that could provide accountability. Yet in the Arar case—as in every
other civil case that has sought accountability for torture—the Obama
administration argued that the courts were not an appropriate forum. To
the Obama administration, defending government officials from suit,
regardless of the gravity of the allegations, is evidently more
important than holding individuals responsible for complicity in
torture.

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